Teachers could have pay frozen after poor school inspection reports

Ofsted’s ‘satisfactory’ grade for schools will from September be replaced with ‘requires improvement’. Photograph: Alamy

Teachers could have their pay frozen after school inspections under new Ofsted measures aimed at linking salaries with the quality of classroom performance.

Announcing the changes, Sir Michael Wilshaw, the chief inspector of schools, said Ofsted will“consider whether there is a correlation between the quality ofteaching and salary progression”.

Inspectors will look at anonymised information about the performance management of all teachers in schools they visit to ensure that heads are using pay to raise standards, Ofsted says. But inspectors will not be able to influence the salary of individual teachers.

In a speech in February, the chief inspector said heads should only approve salary increases for the most hardworking teachers. “The thing that irritates good teachers, people who work hard and go the extra mile, is seeing the people that don’t do that being rewarded,”Wilshaw said.

MPs have recommended that teachers’ pay should be more closely linked to the value they add to pupil performance so that the best are rewarded while the weakest are discouraged from staying in the profession.

Christine Blower, general secretary of the National Union of Teachers, criticised the measure, saying it was wrong to pay one teacher more than another for success that was due to the efforts of everyone in the school.

She said: “Performance management is supposed to be about encouraging teachers in developing their skills, not about judging pay or comparing pupil results,” Blower said. “Teaching is a collegiate profession and this is a divisive, unrealistic and simplistic way of looking at how schools work.”

In the same announcement, Ofsted dropped plans to inspect schools without notice after protest from heads. From this autumn schools will be given notice the afternoon before inspectors visit. At present, the normal notice period is two days.

Heads feared that inspecting schools without notice meant they might be away when inspectors arrived, and that the proposed change indicated a lack of trust in the professions.

Russell Hobby, general secretary of the National Association of Head Teachers (NAHT), praised Ofsted for dropping the proposal for no-notice inspection.

Wilshaw said the progress made by pupils would be central to inspectors’ judgment. If pupils were making good progress, a school would be able to get a good Ofsted report even if results were below average.

Wilshaw confirmed that Ofsted would no longer describe schools as “satisfactory” when they were not providing a good level of education. From September, the “satisfactory” grade will be replaced with “requires improvement” and those schools will be subject to an explicit report of its failings and a full re-inspection within two years.

If a school is judged to require improvement at two consecutive inspections, and is still not providing a good education at the third, it is likely to be placed in special measures. Ofsted will expect schools to improve to “good” within four years.

He said: “School leaders will be relieved to hear that Ofsted has listened to their concerns. This signals a move towards establishing a more constructive working relationship between the profession and its inspectorate.

“Ofsted is rightly maintaining a robust position on standards– a position which the NAHT supports – but this move signifies a genuine attempt to work with schools on the best way to achieve those standards.”

South Korea, often applauded as an education success story, does not use performance pay. But Finland, often commended for an equitable system, does use an element of performance-based pay.

England has a performance threshold linked to higher pay – while France and Germany do not use performance pay.

But within this bigger picture of ambiguity there are some identifiable and contradictory trends.

In economies where teachers are relatively poorly paid, performance-related pay can be associated with improved student performance.

The report says this might suggest that for countries that cannot afford good pay for teachers, such a strategy could have value.

But in countries where teachers’ pay is relatively good, the use of performance pay is linked to poorer performance.

Measuring results

The report also emphasises that performance pay comes in many forms and raises many difficult questions:

How is performance to be reliably and fairly measured? How can an individual teacher’s impact be separated from the contribution of other staff? Should rewards be shared among staff reflecting their collective effort?

And it says that many successful school systems have a wider approach to attracting and rewarding staff.

This can include ensuring the public status of teachers, providing career development and giving teachers professional responsibility.

Michael Gove proposes that schools set own teachers’ pay

The education secretary Michael Gove has suggested that schools set their own teachers’ pay. Photograph: David Jones/PA

England’s state schools could be allowed to set their teachers’ salaries themselves, the education secretary has proposed, leading to the end of a national pay scale for the profession.

Michael Gove made the suggestion in a submission to a review on teachers’ pay due to report this autumn.

His idea would trigger one of the biggest shakeups in teachers’working conditions for a generation and was deeply unpopular withtrade unions.

Gove said the current national pay scale for the profession was too rigid and meant that schools in some parts of the country struggled to recruit good teachers, while others significantly overpaid their staff.

Academies are already allowed to deviate from the national pay scale, but just 35% have chosen to do so.

Government research shows a wide variation in teacher vacancies and turnover across the country. In London, there are at least 40% more vacancies than across the rest of the country. Salford, in Greater Manchester, has several schools with a large number of vacancies, but in 90% of its schools there are no vacancies. Teacher turnover is above average in east London, London and the south-east, but low in the north-east.

These regional discrepancies are “indicative of the challenges that exist at an individual school level”, the government’s submission to the school teachers’ review body states.

Abolishing the national pay scale for teachers would enable schools to “accommodate local market-facing pay fluctuations and any school specific issues that might affect the school’s ability to attract and retain high quality teachers”, the submission says.

It would also allow schools to manage their budgets more effectively and pay good teachers more, earlier in their careers. However, the submission admits there are considerable disadvantages to a system of complete deregulation.

The government could not oblige all schools to take account of the local labour market, for example, and schools could pay qualified teachers at a significantly reduced rate. Other suggestions include giving headteachers and their governing bodies a larger degree of pay flexibility than they currently have.

At present, teachers’ pay automatically rises according to their experience.

Gove has also asked the school teachers’ review body to look into whether teachers’ pay should be more closely linked to performance and whether there should be local pay, triggering threats of strikes from the National Union of Teachers (NUT).

This week, an international study by the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development showed there was no clear link between awarding teachers performance-related pay and improving standards in schools.

Gove’s proposal to scrap teachers’ national pay scale was greeted with anger from trade unions.

Christine Blower, general secretary of the NUT, said a national pay scale gave the profession transparency and ensured “much greater fairness and non-discrimination than pay levels determined at school level”.

“Education is a nationally-delivered service so local pay for a teacher is completely inappropriate. It would reduce teacher mobility, create shortages in areas of lower pay, hit recruitment and retention, and create needless extra expense and bureaucracy for schools. The most disadvantaged parts of the country would be hit by a double whammy of government cuts and lower pay,” she said.

Russell Hobby, general secretary of the National Association of Head Teachers, said teachers’ pay should be more closely linked to performance. “Good teachers ought to be able to progress more quickly on the basis of a rounded and objective judgement of their performance,” he said. But he rejected the idea of schools setting their teachers’ pay. “This will force schools in our most deprived communities to pay staff less,” he said.